Earlier this year, Donald Trump scored a series of victories when he got a federal judge to essentially do his bidding for him regarding the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into his handling of classified documents. The first victory came when that judge, Aileen cannon granted Trump’s request for a special master to review the 11,000 government documents seized at Mar-a-Lago in August and blocked prosecutors from continuing to use the documents until the review was complete. The second, perhaps even more absurd, victory came a few weeks later when Cannon ruled that Trump did not have to comply with an order from the special master she had just appointed instructing him to file an affidavit describing exactly what he believed the FBI had planted when it searched his house, an unfounded claim he had shouted about without any evidence since the agency had legally executed a search warrant at his for-profit club/private residence.
Not surprisingly, the legal community had thoughts about Cannon’s actions and they weren’t right. Raymond Dear, Samuel Buell, a law professor at Duke University The New York Times: “For any lawyer with serious experience in federal criminal justice who is honest, this ruling is laughably bad, and the written justification is even weaker.” Laurence Tribe tweeted“In the tank for Trump barely describes it.” Andrew Weismann, a former federal prosecutor, wrote that Cannon was “completely unfit to serve on the bench”.
And on Thursday, an appeals court weighed in to say essentially the same thing! By Slate:
The opinion was delivered by a three-judge panel of Conservatives; William Prior, a George W. Bush appointee, Briton Grant and André Brasher, appointed by none other than Donald Trump. And in a professional low that Cannon will probably want to erase from her resume, every line is basically an incredibly harsh review of her work. For example, the introduction, which simply reads, “This appeal requires that we consider whether the district court had jurisdiction to prevent the United States from using lawfully seized documents in a criminal investigation. The answer is no.” that she had no authority to make and says that more than once she “stepped in with [her] own reasoning”, which was clearly flawed. As a legal journalist Chris Geidner put it“I would simply never leave the house again if a jury of fellow travelers did this to me in an opinion.”
Like Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, “The decision could not be more emphatic or devastating for both” Cannon and Trump; the latter “has lost the benefit of a special master delaying the federal investigation into his alleged wrongdoing,” as well as “his closest judicial ally in combat.”
Last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee both the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Trump’s decision to bring classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and key aspects of the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol , citing Trump’s decision to run as a thirteenth candidate for president A final decision on whether to prosecute Trump will ultimately come from Garland.
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If only someone had seen this coming!Per The New York Times:
